| This is a study of the conflation of the sacred and the profane in Old French vernacular hagiography and devotional literature. The first chapter focuses on the use of narrative motifs and rhetorical figures such as portraits of beauty and ugliness as well as opulence and physical deprivation in hagiography, devotional literature and secular romance using works such as Rutebeuf s Vie de Sainte Marie l'Egyptienne and Thais (La Vie des peres), Chretien de Troye's Erec et Enide, Yvain, Perceval and Philomena, Beroul's Roman de Tristan and Marie de France's Lanval. The second chapter analyzes romance motifs in the prose and verse versions of Niece (La Vie des peres), comparing methods of seduction in this tale to pastourelle poetry and Chretien de Troyes' Chevalier de la Charette while allegorical dream imagery is compared to episodes in Renaut de Bage's Le Bel Inconnu and entries in contemporary bestiaries: the authors' use of courtly motifs renders this work a generic hybrid called hagiographical romance. The third chapter examines the use of hagiographical figures such as the childhood love for God, cross-dressing and the desire to remain preserve one's virginity in La Vie de Sainte Euphrosine and Rutebeuf's Frere Denise, and suggests that Rutebeuf's fabliau constitutes a satire of hagiographical literature in general and the phenomenon of virgin monks in particular. The fourth and final chapter discusses hagiographical motifs in La Vie de Sainte Marine and Heldris de Cornouaille's Roman de Silence, and demonstrates that the latter's use of hagiographic commonplaces, including transvestism, false accusations of sexual misconduct, the only child motif and the virtues of humility and obedience transform its heroine into a secular saint. My study concludes that medieval genres of literature have more fluid boundaries than previously supposed, and suggests that the primary reasons for this generic fluidity are related to authors' desire to attract a wide reading and listening public to hagiographic and devotional literature and to facilitate the interpretation of the individual tale's spiritually and morally edifying message by using universally-coded rhetorical figures and narrative devices that may be read and interpreted regardless of evolving notions of genre. |
